10/13/2023 0 Comments Drone meaning in farsiMA Poetry, as I once heard the Marathi-language poet Dilip Chitre say, is protest. In what way is Abbasi’s poetry an extension of her activism? What do you feel Abbasi’s poems do? When I first read Rira’s work and started to translate her, I found that her voice remains with me as the reader long after I have left the page, that her poetry adheres to our shared human experiences of pain, survival, and (the need for) collective joy and wellbeing. Living in translation is often an obligation for marginalized cultures and identities, a necessity to survive and gain visibility within the dominant language and culture. We render the world around us constantly in the languages we think and speak in, whether by choice or obligation. Though we all are, in a sense-some of us more than others. I often think that I am in a constant state of translation. I sometimes read a writer in one language and remember or quote them in another. Honestly, I don’t recall whether I first read Rira in Farsi or English. Your question regarding the language of my encounter with Rira’s work is interesting. My translations of Rira’s poems along with an interview with two other Iranian poets were eventually published in 2010 on the PAW website. That was the beginning of our ongoing conversation in poetry and friendship. The festival’s charter stated that “Poetry for peace is affiliated to humanity, regardless of race, religion, sex and geography.” I was really intrigued by those lines and I immediately sent Rira an email, asking if she would be interested in an interview. In searching for Iranian poets to translate for the PAW, I came upon the website of Iran’s International Peace Poetry Festival, the brainchild of Rira Abbasi. He responded with much warmth and welcomed my ideas. So, I sent an email to poet Sam Hamill, one of the founders of PAW, and expressed my interest in collaboration. When did the rhetoric of war become the normative and dominant discourse? Why is war always represented as this inevitable, inerasable, and impending event in the rhetoric of world powers? If war is the death of words and the distortion of language, what factors render “peace” as dialogue? Why is the onus of dialogue and “cultural ambassadorship,” however, always shouldered by the lesser privileged and the marginalized? In other words, why does one culture assume the position of the translator/reader while the other is reduced to the position of the translated? Isn’t violence against Muslims and people of color also terrorism? In asking myself questions such as these, I set out to look for Iranian poets who were engaged with this discourse and addressed such immediate inquiries in their writing. One of the few interesting platforms that I came across was the Poets Against the War (PAW) movement website. At the time I was a 25-year-old student of literature in India, and a regular reader of pro-peace/anti-war forums. Maryam Ala Amjadi I first came across Rira’s work when I started to contemplate the vocabulary of peace in contemporary Iranian poetry. Joan Hua How did you come across Abbasi’s work? Did you first read her in English or in Farsi? What were your first impressions? I conducted the following interview through email correspondence, during Ala Amjadi’s relocation from Canterbury, UK-interrupted by a trip to London- to Porto, Portugal. fellow in Text and Event in Early Modern Europe (TEEME) at University of Kent and Universidade do Porto. Thus began her ongoing conversation with Rira Abbasi, a known Iranian peace activist.Īn award-winning poet herself, Ala Amjadi is the poetry editor of Hysteria, a periodical of critical feminisms, and a current Ph.D. While studying in India six years ago, intensely concerned with the overwhelming representation of war embedded in everyday language and “the rhetoric of world powers,” she sought dialogue with fellow writers through such platforms as Poets Against the War (PAW). Her perception of words and meanings embodies a truly cosmopolitan insight, tuning straight in to the shared human experiences of struggle and wellbeing. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived in multiple countries since. “I often think that I am in a constant state of translation,” she says. In the following interview, Ala Amjadi confesses that she cannot recall whether she first read Abbasi in Farsi or English. Poet Lore’s Spring/Summer 2015 issue features a portfolio of Rira Abbasi poems in translation by Maryam Ala Amjadi.
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